Um... so my high school Calculus teacher, who is lots, lots smarter than I am, thinks "emotion" is evidence of intelligent design.

I have gone in a similar direction at times, finding my own consciousness to be evidence of a general place for consciousness in the universe. That is, if the machine that is me is conscious of itself in this universe, then EITHER there is a magic sky-father who pastes consciousness onto some kinds of machines but not others, at his whim OR there is a physics-of-consciousness that we observe produces consciousness in us but which would then lead us to expect that there is consciousness in things other than us. So while your calculus teacher goes to theism, apparently, upon reflecting on his own emotions (and presumably his consciousness of them), I tended to go to pan-theism, not in the sense that there is something that omniscient or omnibenevolent, but that there is some principle of consciousness in the physical universe we live in of which our own particular kind of consciousness is just one instance.

I would not think as ill of your calculus teacher about this as many other a-theists might. Consciousness is real and not something we have any physics for, yet.